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In the first Final Destination, a group of teenagers board a plane for a fun trip to Paris. One of them falls asleep and has a premonition that the plane is gonna explode mid-air. He, a teacher, and a few other friends get the heck off the plane, and sure enough, it does explode. Then the survivors slowly get picked off in increasingly ridiculous Rube Goldberg-esque death traps because Death is mad they escaped his grasp the first time.

Final Destination 2 is basically the same film but with less melodrama and better deaths.

Exactly one year after the plane explosion in the first movie, Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) heads out for a Spring Break holiday with three of her friends. Just before she pulls onto the highway she has a premonition of a massive, deadly, pile-up on that highway (we see it too and it is the best scene in the movie). Freaked out she decides not to pull out. Moments later that accident does occur.

Knowing the story from the first movie, Kimberly is now afraid that those she saved are now being stalked by death. Knowing this is a movie, we now anxiously await those deaths.

Most of them are top-notch. The film does an amazing job of setting up a scene, showing us multiple possible ways a character could die then finding ways to surprise us. It is terrific fun.

It is less fun when it is giving us exposition. At least twice in the first twenty minutes, characters explain to us the setup of the movie (by explaining the plot of the first movie, which presumably the majority of folks watching the sequel have already seen.) Between kills the characters discuss what they need to do in order to survive.

Clear Rivers (Ali Larter, first billed but who doesn’t show up until a good 30 minutes into this 90-minute movie), the Final Girl of the first movie, has been living in a psych ward (padded cells seem safer than the real world) is brought out for helpful advice (and explain the rules of this movie).

There is less exposition in this one than in the first film, and it is cleaner and faster, but still kind of a drag. The death scenes work best when they seem to be freaks of nature rather than supernatural in nature. The early ones are the best, by the end Death (always invisible) starts moving things on his own which is a lot less fun than random crap killing the characters.

None of the characters are particularly well-developed, but honestly, who cares? You come to these films for the intricate death scenes and this one delivers on that front incredibly well.

final destination poster

A group of American high school kids boards a plane headed for Paris for a few weeks. One of them, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) falls asleep before the plane takes off and has a vision of the plane exploding mid-air. He awakens with a fright and freaks the heck out. One of his classmates, Carter (Kerry Smith) aggressively tells Alex to chill out and a fight ensues. In the aftermath Alex, Carter, and a few others including Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), Billy Hitchcock (Sean William Scott), and their teacher Mrs. Lewton (Kristen Cloke) are all kicked off the plane.

Sure enough, moments later the plane takes off and then explodes killing everyone on board. Since Alex told everyone the plane was going to explode before it did, the FBI thinks he must have been involved. Everyone at his high school just thinks he’s a freak. Only Clear Rivers believes him.

Soon enough some of the others who survived the explosion begin to die under mysterious circumstances. A visit to the morgue and a chat with Tony Todd reveal that when you cheat death, death comes at you. Surmising that the kids are now dying in the order they would have died on the plane (by using the seating plan and extrapolating where the explosion occurred) Alex figures out who will be next and tries to save them.

He’s not very good at it.

I knew this movie was gonna be dumb, but I had no idea what dumb depths it would dumb down to. I don’t usually nitpick movies over little details. I don’t mind small plot holes. But I was shaking my head over this one within the first few minutes.

The whole point of these movies (and there are a lot of them) is to create larger and more complex methods for the kids to be killed – call them Rube Goldbert deathtraps. I’ve not seen any of the sequels, but apparently, they get really ridiculous. Here they are pretty fun, but not particularly impressive. The last one goes over the top in a way I won’t spoil, but that I found really enjoyable to watch.

I don’t know why I’ve never seen this film until now. I was totally on board with the post Scream cycle of self-aware horror films and this came out at a time when I watched just about every movie that came to my local cineplex, but I must have missed this one. I’m glad I was able to catch up with it now, and I’ll probably eventually get to the sequels, but I can’t say I’ll be in a hurry to do so.